iphoto lost all photos - request to server failed?

Well, no way to really tell if it's a warranty issue or not, might take it in for help with this.

The Partition map is where the Mac starts to find out where everything on the drive is, sort of like a Road map, you it might take an exit that doesn't really exist! 😉

Oh, you didn't try that yet?

Definitely do, but whether clone is a good idea or not is up in the air, I guess if you don't have any backups I might try it, but with the Partition map messed up it's hard to tell what off ramp it's going to take... picture vandals moving street signs & house numbers around in the middle of the night... and you only have a piece of paper with the street & address on it.

Oh yes indeed, & likely TM has been failing for the same reason.

I'd try the Repair from the Restore Partition.

We can't tell yet where the problem is, but do you still have AppleCare on it? I think it needs to be looked at in person.

BTW. There's no way to undo checking a helpful or solved.

It comes with a free 1 year Warranty, & can be expanded to 3 years for cost.

surely thats sufficient to get it to an apple store?

Yes.

On the last problem, how sure are you of your Backup's reliability?

It's possible that we could fix this ourself by completely Erasing the Drive, Reformatting, & reinstalling.

I agree with that. 🙂

Your symptoms, as others have noted, are disturbing. The partition map is what the operating system uses to find files (and pieces of files -- files are not stored contiguously on the disk). Not sure why one type of Disk Utility run finds nothing wrong and the other finds something wrong, but that's indicative of something wrong. By the way, are you using File Vault? (If so, that complicates all this to some degree.)

I have read that running disk repair/verify from an externally booted disk or from the recovery disk is more reliable than running disk utility "in place" while booted from the disk in question. However in conjunction with your other problematic symptoms, clearly something is wrong.

I also noted earlier that this is an ebay-purchased computer. Don't take this the wrong way, but often ebay is where people unload things that aren't working right for them. I wonder if the previous owner encountered the same issues and decided simply to sell the machine so someone else could try to deal with them ... (like you)

Given that it is from ebay, have you checked the hardware of this Mac with the Hardware Test program that is on the recovery disk? That could be a source of the problems, hopefully not.

I think your best bet is to make two backups (that's for redundancy) of your user folder contents. Try to make sure you can find and browse those files from the backups. Then I would obtain Disk Warrior and run it to try to fix any problems. Disk Warrior will find and fix things that Apple utilities cannot. If that works, you might be ready to go. If Disk Warrior says things are fine, that would then point to either hardware problems inside the Mac, or a damaged system installation. For the latter, you could try the latest combo update reapplying it, or a fresh installation of the OS. If that doesn't cure what you have, I'd completely reformat the disk and reinstall a fresh operating system and software that you have, and then restore your user folder from your backup(s).

If you have file vault turned on, I'd turn if off for now until everything is working right again.

One last thing -- when you go to Apple for test/diagnosis, they often will end up doing a complete reformat of the disk, so it's extra important to backup your files as best you can. If the partition map is broken, you may have trouble finding and backing up all your files, but I'm not totally convinced that your partitiion map is broken, you have contradictory indications.

I think your iPhoto issues have to wait until you get a reliable system running. The iPhoto and Safari programs might be damaged, for instance, it's hard to say. Your photos are physically there, they are not lost, but the iPhoto database may be having trouble finding them. They can be re-imported into a new iPhoto Library but don't do that until your system is stable. You can see the actual photo files by right clicking on the iPhoto Library to Show Package Contents, and then you'll see some folders, the one called "Originals" has your original photo files, other folders will have changed or modified photo files. They are all there, but the database may be damaged and thus unable to locate the photo files. That can be fixed in a variety of ways, but not worth doing until yur system is fixed.